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Sports · US Open 2026 · Men's Singles · Round of 32
Frances Tiafoe vs 
Valentin Vacherot
Round of 32
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ABC · ESPN app
My pick: Frances Tiafoe to advance · locked 2026-09-03 03:40 UTCPrediction
Tiafoe has been to two US Open semi-finals, in 2022 and 2024, and no player left in this quarter has a longer history of playing well on this particular court in front of this particular crowd. He is 38-17 for the season, 203-166 on hard courts for his career, and eleven days before this tournament began he was in the Cincinnati final. He has also spent a lot of himself already: five sets and nearly four hours against the American Martin Damm on Tuesday night, finishing close to 1 a.m., and then a night session against the qualifier Rei Sakamoto in which he was out-aced 18-7 and out-hit 38 winners to 23 and won in straight sets anyway, on the strength of 18 unforced errors to Sakamoto's 40. Vacherot is playing his first US Open main draw at 27 — remarkable for a man who won the Shanghai Masters last October from qualifying, ranked 204th, the lowest-ranked champion in the history of that level. He beat Kamil Majchrzak in four sets and 3hr 26min on Wednesday with seventeen aces and twelve double faults, which is the range of him. They have never met. The hard-court Elo gap is 97 points, and Tiafoe's tolerance for a loose set is the difference.
The case for Frances Tiafoe
64% to winTiafoe is 11th in the world, has reached the semi-finals here twice, and has a career hard-court record more than four times the size of Vacherot's. He was out-served and out-hit by a qualifier on Wednesday and still won in straight sets, because he made 18 unforced errors in three sets and Sakamoto made 40 — which is exactly the profile that punishes a player who hit twelve double faults in his own last match. And this is New York, where only Djokovic and Fritz have more tour-level wins on American soil among active players than Tiafoe's 126.
The case for Valentin Vacherot
36% to winVacherot beat Novak Djokovic and won a Masters 1000 title inside a fortnight last October, so the ceiling is not in question — and at 6ft 4in with seventeen aces in his last match he has the serve to shorten points against a man who has already played eight sets this week. Tiafoe needed five to get out of the first round against a player ranked 90th. If Vacherot's first serve behaves the way it did in the fourth set on Wednesday, 74% in and 88% of those points won, this is a very different match from the one the rankings describe.
Both cases written 2026-09-03, before the first ball — frozen into the record exactly as written, whatever the result. The percentages are mine — opinions with a percent sign on. They add to 100 because tennis has no draw to hide the rounding in.
Tale of the tape
Frances TiafoeValentin VacherotPlayer vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-09-02.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-02.
The briefing
Storylines
- Vacherot is playing his first US Open main draw at 27, ten months after winning the Shanghai Masters from qualifying.
- He was ranked 204th when he won that title, the lowest-ranked Masters 1000 champion there has been.
- Tiafoe has reached the US Open semi-finals twice, in 2022 and 2024.
- Tiafoe has already played five sets and nearly four hours against Martin Damm this week.
- They have never met on tour.
Head to head
They have never met at tour level.
Source: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-02.
Watch: Third-round coverage runs across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, with ESPN Deportes in Spanish — and every court streams in the ESPN app, which is where a match away from the two show courts will live. (ESPN press-room release and listings, as of 2026-08-27)
Court & schedule: Not yet assigned. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before, and this match has not reached the board yet. (Official US Open order-of-play release cadence, as of 2026-09-02)
Weather: Wednesday night is wet: showers and thunderstorms likely at 64% on a low near 72°F, which is the night session's problem and the roofs' answer. Thursday stays unsettled — 83°F, showers and thunderstorms likely, again at 64% — and eases to 33% overnight. Friday improves without quite clearing: mostly sunny and 82°F, with a slight shower chance at 23%. Saturday is the clean day, sunny and 78°F on 2%, and Sunday is sunny at 74°F. Ashe and Armstrong close their roofs and play on; everything else waits. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-09-02)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.
At this Stage
The Round of 32 is the third round, and the last one before a Grand Slam draw becomes a small tournament: sixteen men's matches across Friday and Saturday leave sixteen players standing, every one of them having won twice on these courts. This is the round where the seeding chart stops doing any work — from here on, whoever is left is who you play.
Round of 64
Round of 16